Bilateral and regional trade deals frequently include patent provisions that go beyond the minimum requirement of the multilateral Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs). They extend the scope of patentability and provide additional rights to patent holders. This paper systematically maps these “TRIPs-plus” agreements. Exploiting a new dataset, 52 TRIPs-plus agreements are found to have been concluded between 1990 and 2017. The major proponents of these TRIPs-plus agreements on patents are the United States, followed by the European Union and the European Free Trade Association. Other technology-rich countries, such as Japan and Korea, have surprisingly few TRIPs-plus provisions on patent protection in their trade agreements. Few South-South trade agreements include TRIPs-plus provisions, but some include TRIPs-extra provisions on genetic resources and traditional knowledge. Having a clear picture of these TRIPs-plus agreements is essential as they can have important social and economic consequences, including for the development of innovations and access to technologies.

This research studies the allocation of World Bank loans with panel data covering up to 115 countries over three time periods: Cold War (1973-1990), post-Cold War (1991-2000), and post-September 11 (2001-2013). Among our findings, we show that the more a state receives a large amount of loans by the World Bank, the more it supports the US foreign policy. At the same time, our data reveals that recipients of World Bank loans are on average closer to Russian foreign policy than American foreign policy for all periods under consideration. We argue that these results provide evidence that World Bank's loans are used to buy and reward support or abstention for specific resolutions at the United Nations rather than for all the ones adopted in a session.

Theses

This research studies the allocation of World Bank loans with panel data covering up to 115 countries over three time periods: Cold War (1973-1990), post-Cold War (1991-2000), and post-September 11 (2001-2013). Among our findings, we show that the more a state receives a large amount of loans by the World Bank, the more it supports the US foreign policy. At the same time, our data reveals that recipients of World Bank loans are on average closer to Russian foreign policy than American foreign policy for all periods under consideration. We argue that these results provide evidence that World Bank’s loans are used to buy and reward supports or abstentions for specific resolutions in the United Nations rather than for all the ones adopted in a session. Our study furthermore indicates that after September 11 terrorist attacks, World Bank recipient countries receiving the greatest amount of US military assistance were also the ones receiving the largest loans by the Bank. Although this supports the thesis that the events of 9/11 led the United States to use the World Bank in their national interests as during the Cold War, we find that the Bank appears to have limited political considerations in the allocation of its loans after the collapse of the USSR and especially between 2001 and 2013.